Muslims

Nearly 200 religious and civil rights groups are petitioning President Obama to dismantle the regulatory framework behind a Homeland Security program critics say discriminates against Muslims and Arabs.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed one of the architects of the program, Kris Kobach, to his transition team. That, and Trump’s own calls on the campaign trail for “extreme vetting” of immigrants, have led some to believe that he will revive the National Security Exit-Entry Registration System.

The high school I went to, on Long Island, taught me a lot about race. I learned about overt racism, and what we now call microaggressions.

Over a quarter of a century later, I am under no delusions that we live in a post-racial society.

The exhibit is not intended as commentary on today’s politics, its organizers said. Work started on the project six years ago, before sharp rises in Islamophobic rhetoric and violence in the U.S. and Europe, and before Muslim immigration and culture became a flashpoint in American and European politics.

But the Smithsonian is not sorry for the timing, and hopes the exhibit can help quell fears of Islam and its followers.

The study comes in the same year that Larycia Hawkins — Wheaton College’s first black, female professor to receive tenure — parted ways with the evangelical flagship school after she posted on Facebook that both Christians and Muslims worship the “same God.” The controversy stirred fresh debate among evangelicals about whether all religions worship the same God, and whether God accepts the worship of all religions.

As millions of Muslims worldwide sharpen their knives for the annual animal slaughter of Eid al-Adha, some have been left disturbed by their community’s high level of meat consumption.

Walk into any mosque on Sept. 12, the first day of Eid al-Adha for most U.S. Muslims. Chances are, worshippers’ plates will be loaded up with chicken, beef, or lamb.

“It’s as though they think eating meat is obligatory in Islam,” said Mohamed Ghilan, a vegan and student of Islamic jurisprudence in Vancouver, Canada. “And so many people believe that slaughtering an animal on Eid is obligatory, too.”

Nice, on France’s Mediterranean coast, now joins a long list of cities, on four continents, where Islamist terrorists have perpetrated gruesome attacks, mercilessly killing hundreds of innocents.

And those are just where some of the highest-profile outrages have occurred, the ones that attract headlines. The fact that millions of people, mostly other Muslims, survive under the daily brutality of violent Islamists in large parts of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Nigeria, and elsewhere is so routine as to barely be newsworthy.

Stuart Levy, a nurse at a Jerusalem hospital, updates his ward’s work schedule several times a week, with staffers’ vacations, birthdays and more religious holidays than many people know exist.

“We have 18 hospital beds, and on any given day we may have an Orthodox Jew next to a devout Muslim next to a Catholic next to a Druze next to a Russian Orthodox patient,” said Levy, head nurse of the oncology/hematology ward at Hadassah Medical Center-Ein Kerem. “And many of our staff are religiously observant.”

Donald Trump, who has proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States and possible surveillance of mosques, is now talking about “profiling” Muslims as a response to terrorism.

“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump said on CBS’ Face The Nation.

Religious freedom is a foundational tenet for Southern Baptists, but apparently one church official in Georgia didn’t get the memo, at least as it applies to Islam.

Now Gerald Harris is facing sharp criticism, but also the prospect of a Ramadan meal with local Muslims who have invited him so he can get to know them better.